Hit me on my hip
(that’s how people said, “reach out to me” in the 1990s)
Speaking of the nineties, it was ninety-six degrees when I was born — the highest nighttime temperature ever recorded in my small island hometown of Manhattan, New York.
I remember it well. As luck would have it, the city’s hottest night was also New York Presbyterian’s busiest. Not wanting to get in the way, I sat in the hospital’s waiting room, flipping through old magazines. Though the concept was fairly new to me, I couldn’t help but immediately connect with the words that filled them—not with the datelines and bylines, mind you, but with the headlines and taglines.
Page by page, I jumped from one beautiful ad to another. Artistic rendering festooned with pithy strings of language. In a word, I was hooked. I marveled at the way I suddenly longed for stainfighters and anti-inflammatories. I, a mere pre-infant, was at once thinking to myself, “They’re right; I should expect more from my car insurance.” My first word was “Eureka!”
It was then I knew why I would soon be brought into this world — to be a copywriter.
In the years that followed, I have learned to speak, completed high school, and developed campaigns that can also convince a baby to run (not walk) for limited-time door-buster deals.
I will bring the same amount of heat to your next project that July 1995 brought to the circumstances of my birth.